The Dot and the Line: A Quirky Vintage Love Story in Lower Mathematics by Norton Juster, Animated by Chuck Jones

“Moral: To the vector belongs the spoils.”

By Maria Popova

In 1963, two years after he penned his timeless classic The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Juster wrote and illustrated The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (public library) — the quirky and infinitely wonderful love story that unfolds in a one-dimensional universe called Lineland where women are dots and men are lines; a hopeful straight line falls hopelessly in love with a dot out of his league, who only has eyes for a sleazy squiggle, and sets about wooing her. Inspired by the Victorian novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, it’s an endearing and witty fable of persistence and passion, and a creative masterwork at the intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and graphic design.

To woo the dot, the line decides to master the myriad shapes capable of expressing his full potential.

For months he practiced in secret. Soon he was making squares and triangles, hexagons, parallelograms, rhomboids, polyhedrons, trapezoids, parallelepipeds, decagons, tetragrams and an infinite number of other shapes so complex that he had to letter his sides and angles to keep his place.

Before long he had learned to carefully control ellipses, circles and complex curves and to express himself in any shape he wished — “You name it, I’ll play it.”

So he takes the dot out one evening and metamorphoses into a dizzying array of shapes to charm her with his refined versatility.

Juster brings the story to a modern fairy-tale ending, where the dot and the line live “if not happily ever after, at least reasonably so,” and ends with a charming pun for the mathematically tickled:

MORAL: To the vector belongs the spoils.

Juster’s jacket-copy bio is fittingly delightful:

Norton Juster is a dedicated mathematician whose efforts have been focused primarily on the verification of supermarket register receipts and the calculation of restaurant gratuities in a number of foreign currencies. He has also done pioneering work on the psychological effects of mathematical melancholia.

In 1965, the book was adapted into an equally charming, Oscar-winning short film by Chuck Jones, featured here previously and shared again below for our repeated pleasure:

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